On political donations, Canberra is sleepwalking into its own integrity crisis | Katharine Murphy

Everyone in Australian politics is chasing cash, and Sam Dastyari’s lapse of judgment over a travel entitlement repayment is a symptom of a system that needs cleaning up

Once upon a time in Canberra, there was an ironclad convention. People in glass houses didn’t throw stones.

The response to short-term imbroglios about the misuse of parliamentary entitlements or about donations that don’t meet the pub test was to move on quickly. No one inside the system benefited from anyone looking too closely at the closed conventions of Canberra.